Katz as Functionalist

In discussions about Jacob Katz's contribution to the study of the history of the early modern Jewish community it is standard to emphasize his methodological innovation. In his earlier works Katz applied the methods of ‘social history’ to his research and writing about Jewish history. It is customary to observe that he had been trained in sociological method by important interwar German sociologists, especially his mentor, Karl Mannheim. Through Mannheim, Katz was exposed to the theories of the founding giants of modern sociology, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. By applying what he learned to Jewish history, Katz's work took on groundbreaking significance.

This perspective bears clarification. Given the slipperiness of the definition of ‘social history’ and the undisciplined way in which the expression is used, it is important to be precise as to Katz's own understanding of the meaning of this term. It is also imperative to remember that Katz did not work in a vacuum or against the tide. He did not inhabit a new theoretical bubble of his own making, detached from the mainstream. In his methodological approach, Katz may have appeared unusual on the Jewish history scene, but by virtue of his methods and their theoretical grounding he was a member in good standing of the dominant school of sociology in his generation. The scholarly and human focus on the often prickly relations between Katz and his rivals in the community of Jewish historians has obscured the fact that Katz most certainly did fit into the international and Israeli sociology research communities of the 1940s and 1950s.

Katz can be classed in what Dennis Smith called ‘the second long wave’ of historical sociology. (According to Smith the first wave began with seven teenth-century philosophers such as Montesquieu and Hume, and reached its climax with the activities of Weber, Durkheim, and their students.) This second wave began to take shape in the 1930s and continued through to the 1970s. Its pioneers were sociologists such as Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton in the United States, T. H. Marshall in England, and the historian Marc Bloch in France. This wave had two vectors: socio - logical and historical. Katz clearly distinguished between them when he defined his concept of social history in his programmatic article in Scripta Hierosolymitana in 1956.